The competitor missed his job interview – Johan now has over 150 employees in the Philippines!

Johan Jedåker was together with another candidate called for a job interview as a customer service employee at OnlineFactory in the Philippines. The other candidate missed his job interview and Johan got the job. He has now advanced to operations manager and is currently responsible for more than 150 employees.

Johan was on a round-the-world trip and had just arrived in the Philippines after a 6-month stay as a dishwasher in Australia. The plan was to quickly just stop in the island nation before returning to Sweden. Through a friend, he found out that an outsourcing company in Manila was looking for Swedish-speaking staff for a customer service project.

I was a little lucky that another candidate got lost in the taxi and missed his interview and thus I was the only candidate who could come. It was urgent to start the project so I got the job directly at OnlineFactory as a customer service agent for the Swedish e-commerce company Nelly.com, Johan laughs.

Johan has since advanced to operations manager and today has direct responsibility for 150 agents who all work for Swedish online or e-commerce companies. When Johan started in the company, there were no more than 15 employees, but since then the growth continued every year in terms of the number of employees.

We have set up a long-term vision to reach 1,000 employees by the end of 2023. The vision itself may be a bit unusual, but since we work with hiring employees to other companies, the vision is concrete and easy for everyone to understand. We also know that the more employees we become, the more families in the Philippines have secured their livelihood as most of our employees are "breadwinners", says Johan.

OnlineFactory has always maintained its focus on Swedish online and e-commerce companies with services such as customer support, and influencer marketing as well as several different services in content management such as SEO articles, product descriptions, product layouts, photo retouching, translations, and the like.

My job is developing in many different ways. Above all, because we work together with extremely talented customers. Several of our customers are among the absolute leading e-retailers in Sweden - we learn a lot from them. We also develop new services together with our customers based on their needs such as product sourcing from Asia, web development, purchasing management, and much more, Johan explains.

Johan also talks about a very strong family culture within the company. The company was founded by a couple who have since brought in a good friend and his family as co-owners of OnlineFactory. We invest heavily in maintaining a strong family culture within the company, where we are constantly looking for humble and loyal employees who are passionate about performing at the top.

Today we have extremely low staff turnover and very few employees want to quit their jobs with us. In addition to our Filipinos, many of our European employees have formed families here in the Philippines, which binds them even more to the country and OnlineFactory. I think this is something that benefits our customers - we have continuity in our work with employees who stay in their roles for a long time. It is important for all parties, Johan concludes.

Johan also says that he is now a partner in the company and that the company is investing increasingly hard in achieving its vision of having 1,000 employees by the end of 2023. Several major new initiatives are in the pipeline and one of the most exciting is that OnlineFactory also hopes to be at least 1,000 shareholders by the end of 2023.